Album Reviews
Album Review: Basia Bulat – The Garden
Canadian chanteuse Basia Bulat has revisited and reworked tracks from her previous five albums on latest release, ‘The Garden’. It’s out on Secret City Records on 25th February, initially only digitally but it will be followed up by a physical release on 25th March. The 16 songs on ‘The Garden’ were produced by Bulat and …
Album Review: Once Human – Scar Weaver
Scar Weaver is what a band can do with a surplus of time during 2020’s lockdown, thats has allowed the band to hone, refine and re-define their sound. Inspired by a sudden creative surge from latest recruit, guitarist Max Karon. Starting with a scorching thrash metal riff ‘Eidolon’ gets seriously heavy as the drums and bass …
Premiere: Hobart musician Ben Salter unveils new VR video for the luminescent track ‘bliss’ and we review his mesmerising new album ‘twenty-one words for happiness’.
We are very pleased to unveil the premiere of a new video by Hobart/nippaluna artist Ben Salter on the eve of the release of the last of a trilogy of recordings he has done as artist in residence at the Museum Of Old and New Art (MONA) – the largest privately funded collection of art …
Album Review: Luke Seymoup’s ‘Tales of Suburban Angst’ is an effervescent collection of power pop punk gems.
We met Luke Seymoup with the release of the single ‘Paint’ – a gloriously hyperactive piece of power pop – and he has now released the album ‘Tales of Suburban Angst’. Seymoup has continued with what he started out with: a collection of danceable, anthemic pop gems that glisten and sparkle with a self-deprecating sense …
Album Review: God is God – Metamorphoses: shape shifting electronic music and song.
Put two forward thinking musicians together like guitarist producer Etkin Cekin and multi-instrumental chanteuse Galina Ozeran and your unlikely to get stuck in reverse. Meeting in Berlin in 2015, the pair grew a musical relationship through long improvisational sessions, letting their combined narrative lead the way. Cekin’s imaginings, rooted in Istanbul’s indie-experimental scene then swelled …
Album Review: Brisbane’s Noir et Blanc (Amber Ramsay from Cloud Tangle) unveils the ambient classicism of ‘Wallflower Pedestrian’: a beautiful immersive sonic journey.
Noir et Blanc is the new vehicle for Brisbane’s prodigious dream pop wonder Amber Ramsay from the ethereal Cloud Tangle. And ethereal is an adjective that’s going to get quite a run in this review. Where Noir et Blanc departs from Ramsay’s other work is that the music is solely instrumental – a sort of …
Say Psych: Album Review: Los Bitchos – Let The Festivities Begin!
London’s Los Bitchos have finally released their debut LP, aptly titled Let the Festivities Begin! It invokes panthers prowling through a desert, cowgirls swaggering into a saloon and kicking up dust, riding shotgun with a Tarantino heroine. Los Bitchos’ hallucinatory surf-exotica is as evocative as it is playful: the pan-continental group could well be your …
Album Review: Sea Power crest the waves with the beautiful and shimmering ‘Everything Was Forever’, and announce launch shows.
The band whose name was formerly appended by the word ‘British’ has made a rather triumphant return in their new guise as Sea Power. On the one hand, the things that have made the band so special – their distinctive quirkiness and eccentricity steeped in a certain pastoral/rural bliss and ability to combine intelligent, witty …
Album Review: Felicia – Feel Good Songs For Oblivion
It was the middle of May 2020 when Felicia released her first musical exploits to the world, in the shape of ‘Felicia and the Gammon Lumps’. Now, almost two years later, comes the full-length Felicia album, to be released (of course) on Valentines Day this year. Opening with a suitably alt-metal double-kick drum instrumental-avec-samples, ‘Feel …
Album Review: Ilmiliekki Quartet – Ilmiliekki Quartet : Essential atmospheric jazz
Trying to unravel the interconnections and collaborations in jazz is often like code-breaking. Players are likely to be in several groups at a time, they form their own units, perform solo, take a guest spot, record a one-off with new people to keep up that spirit of adventure. The four members of Helsinki’s Ilmiliekki Quartet, …